Mapping

Stereo and contrapunctus have proposed a simplified approach to mapping public transport routes. This is based on their extensive experience in Luxembourg and Delhi respectively. Feedback was requested on the tagging mailing list.

Baloo Uriza has completed a large project of cleaning up southern California’s Interstate 405 freeway, much of which hasn’t been significantly touched since the TIGER imports. A number of issues, largely relating to complications arising from lane-mapping very large roads and editors not highlighting lane information such as placement, lane change restrictions and per-lane access restrictions, are highlighted in his wrap-up on talk-us.

Martijn van Exel introduced a new type of MapRoulette Challenge, the Quick Fix. Unlike traditional MapRoulette Challenges, the new Quick Fix Challenges require no experience with OSM editing tools like JOSM or iD. MapRoulette asks you, the mapper, a question that just requires a simple yes/no answer.

The voting for Ferdinand0101’s proposal of name:Zsye=*, which enables mappers to add names writeable with emojis, has closed. The proposal was unsuccessful.

Community

The OSMF Board marked International Women’s Day by reflecting on the limitations to knowing exactly how many women contribute to the OpenStreetMap project and why some people contribute more or less than others. They also note that the reasons that bring people of any gender, origin or age to our project seem to be similar among contributors: it’s fun to make the map data a bit better and it’s rewarding when someone finds your work useful.

Miriam Gonzalez, one of the founders of Geochicas, was featured in an article on women in mapping by Anastasia Moloney. The article discusses how women mappers tend to add services often overlooked by men, such as hospitals, childcare services, toilets, domestic violence shelters and women’s health clinics. The OSMF Board’s full responses to Anastasia’s questions can be found here.

HOT uses International Women’s Day to recap the previous year’s HOT gender achievements, to summarise what can be done to ensure maps are being made for, by, and about women and to state HOT’s Gender Commitments.

Mapillary and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team are launching a new mapping campaign, #map2020, to improve maps and navigation in low- and middle-income countries. Jessica Bergmann invited communities to get involved for the chance for one individual to win a fully-funded trip to present at the HOT Summit in Cape Town, South Africa. This year’s campaign calls for communities to capture street-level imagery with Mapillary that contributes to improved navigation within their communities. Expressions of interest must be submitted by 20 March and final projects by 20 April.

Marco Minghini announced that the call for abstracts for the Academic Track at State of the Map 2020 has been extended to 26 March.

Nathalie Sidibé provided her background, motivation for OSM, and her achievements in an article in her user diary.

Andy Mabbett reminded us of a debate five years ago about the value of adding Wikidata IDs to OSM. Andy provides an example of the benefits of the link and asks others for their projects, which make use of both OSM and Wikidata.

Events

Jungle Bus is organising a Project of the Month in March, in the French-speaking community, on charging stations for electric vehicles. Numerous tools are available to contribute in the field or from home. Useful information is available on the project wiki page. The hashtag for this project is #balanceTaBorne

Michael Reichert announced (automatic translation) that the OSM Saturday planned for 14 March at the FOSSGIS Conference 2020 was cancelled due to current developments.

Current developments have also resulted in the Berliner OSM Hackweekend, planned for 28 and 29 March, being cancelled, as reported (automatic translation) by Lars Lingner.

Humanitarian OSM

Sean Fleming reported on how Microsoft’s AI for Humanitarian Action program is working with HOT and Bing to bring together satellite mapping, machine learning, and volunteers to create a new generation of detailed maps. The AI-powered tools help make the human volunteers more productive by predicting features, suggesting that a shape may be a building, and speeding up initial identification.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team invites everyone to submit ideas, during the Call for Sessions, for events at the 6th HOT Summit in Cape Town, South Africa, to be held 1 and 2 July 2020.

HOT announced its internship programmes around Google Summer of Code and Outreachy, a programme which organises short paid internships for typically under-represented people.

The good folk of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, love their Lenten fish fry so much that a few clever souls have created a Lenten Fish Fry Map to help residents catch their weekly fried fish fix. Emily Mercurio describes how Hollen Barmer and Code for Pittsburg used open source software and open geospatial data to build a platform for volunteers to gather, update, and share fish fry information.

Maps

The Russian taxi ordering service ‘Taksovichkof‘ uses OSM as a basemap. We want to note that they have specified attribution properly.

A team of Russian cartographers created (automatic translation) a detailed map of Southern Ural. According (automatic translation) to one of the project participants Alexey Klyanin, it is based on OSM data.

The map at coronavirus.app visualises the number of people infected with the new virus by country on an OSM basemap.

switch2OSM

The Russian public movement ‘Antiborshevik’ (borshevik is Russian for heracleum), which aims to fight the harmful and poisonous plant Heracleum sosnowskyi, recently switched to OSM. Now their map is made using the uMap service, which uses OSM.

Open Data

The Saint Louis University in Baguio City, Philippines has recently hosted its first mapathon and was pleasantly surprised by the number of participants. GOwin shares their impressions of the event and the results in a nicely illustrated user diary post.

OpenTrees.org, a service which currently visualises 12 million municipal street and park trees from 179 different sources, went live recently.

Licences

Christian Quest reported on the success of OSM France’s ‘AttributionIsNotOptional’ campaign (which we reported earlier). OSM France’s tile servers delivered a tile requesting that OSM be attributed as the source instead of a map tile, to websites using the tiles without the correct OSM attribution. The source citation is mandatory according to paragraph 4.3 of the ODbL. There are some pros and cons in the discussion about the procedure. Interesting to see who does not speak out 😉

Software

The JOSM team wrote about the planned removal of the JavaScript API from JOSM, following the removal of the JavaScript engine Nashorn from Java, and the impact it had and still has to the core of the editor JOSM.

Programming

Nick Whitelegg informed us about the start of a new development blog for his OSM-based augmented reality project Hikar and the off-road ‘StreetView’-like application opentrailview.org.

Russian user Vascom, who recently began to create weekly maps for the Maps.Me app for all regions of Russia and CIS countries, shared the scripts he uses to do this.

According to Roman Shuvalov, the developer of the game ‘Generation Street’, in the new version of his game you can export generated 3D models into .ply and .obj.

Releases

DBeaver SQL Client version 7.0.0 for Windows, MAC OS X and Linux is available. This DB Client allows users to Access/Edit/View the major SQL DBase. Major enhancements were announced for this version:

Data viewer and data editor UI major improvements

SQL editor major improvements.

In the new version (9.6.0) of the famous mobile navigation app Maps.Me, which is based on OSM data, isolines were added (iOS, Android). Now navigation through mountains and hills will become a little easier. The function is also available in offline mode.

Did you know …

… in a tweet the JOSM team reminded editors in SK, BR, CZ, FR, DE, PT and RU to enable their country-specific JOSM validator rules.

… that the KFC representative office in Russia uses OSM to display its restaurants on its website?

… about the Russian website ‘Accident Map‘? (automatic translation) Its developers take data from the official traffic police statistics portal and map it. OSM is used as a basemap.

OSM in the media

FingerLakes1.com, a website offering local news, weather and sports for the Finger Lakes region in New York, featured OSM in an article titled ‘OpenStreetMap: Find Your Way In A Foreign City Like A Local’.

Other “geo” things

GPS Worldcarried a story on ‘RoadTagger’, an artificial intelligence model developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Qatar Computing Research Institute to determine road features, such as type or lane count, from aerial imagery. Testing of the model with OSM data from 20 USA cities showed that it predicted the number of lanes with 77% accuracy and the road surface type with 93% accuracy.

Upendra Oli created a tutorial video on how to animate OSM time series data using QGIS.

Open Knowledge Belgium and Noms Peut-Être (automatic translation) have created a map visualising the street names of Brussels by gender. Only 6% of streets named for people in Brussels are named after women and only one street is named after a transgender man. Dries blogged about the creation and launch of EqualStreetNames.Brussels.

A user of the app RunKeeper, which tracked his bike ride close to a crime scene, was subjected to a police investigation following a ‘geofence warrant’ that led Google, whose location services the app is using, to share the data of its nearby phone users with the police.

Editorial Page – About Us – Contact

What is the idea?

weeklyOSM updates the community, on a weekly basis, about what is going on in the OSM Universe. weeklyOSM is intended for everyone, from experienced mappers to new OSM members. It is created by mappers and OSM enthusiasts. Contributors to weeklyOSM in all languages are always welcome. Due to the enormous workload (52 issues per year, no vacations, no holidays) new languages can only be set up if three mappers agree to cooperate.

The idea of weeklyOSM is to collect relevant OSM news from all over the world, process it and translate it into as many languages as possible. This should help to inform the community as comprehensively as possible and overcome language barriers.

weeklyOSM is independent of all organisations and companies. This applies to OSMF, HOT, FOSSGIS … and all other companies not listed here. Nevertheless, we would be happy if our current issue (in whatever language) would appear on the start page of the Wiki on an equal footing with “Use OpenStreetMap”, “Contribute free map data” and “Software Development”. We would also like to point out that the editorial staff are not subject to OSMF supervision.